What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2009

The Year: 2009
What the Nominees Were: The number of nominations went back up to ten, where it’s remained ever since. Avatar, The Blind Side, District Nine, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! is excellent. In the Loop from England deserved a nomination.

What Did Win: The Hurt Locker
How It’s Aged: It’s great that a movie by a woman director finally won Best Picture, but it’s sort of a joke that Kathryn Bigelow only won by making an all-male testosterone fest. This movie questioned what we were actually doing in Iraq in so quiet of a voice, that it could easily be mistaken for a recruiting poster.

What Should’ve Won: An Education
How Hard Was the Decision: Not that hard because I love this movie. I thought it would be nice to give it to a different movie, also directed by a woman, that actually dared to give speaking roles to women!

Director: Lone Scherfig

Writer: Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber

Stars: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Olivia Williams, Emma Thompson

The Story: In 1961 London, Oxford-obsessed 16 year old Jenny Mellor loses her interest in going to college as she gets seduced by a conman, getting a different type of “education.” When she realizes that he’s already married, she has to get her life back on track.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Picture, Actress and Adapted Screenplay
Why It Didn’t Win: Hollywood couldn’t resist pitting Bigelow against James Cameron, the ex-husband who cheated on her, making Hurt Locker and Avatar the only two real contenders. An Education got nominated but got lost in the new sea of ten nominees and forgotten.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. In the commentary, Sarsgaard points out a brilliant thing Scherfig does. In one scene, the whole point is that Jenny’s mom fails to speak up about the danger Jenny is putting herself in, so Scherfig subconsciously calls attention to that: “There’s an expectation created by the camera move that comes up later that the mother’s going to say one last thing, but she doesn’t. Like right here, in cinema language, she supposed to say one last thing right there.” A brilliant way to subtly dramatize something not happening.
   
2. The original memoir (really just a magazine piece) is well worth reading. There are so many things here that only could have come from real life because no one would make them up. Real sex is always so much weirder than movie sex, as shown here when David bizarrely wants to deflower Jenny with a banana.
3. I love how Hornby’s dialogue avoids the Sorkin Stammer. Jenny thinks highly of her own verbal abilities, and frequently tries to skewer whomever she’s talking to. In some scripts, her victims would just stammer helplessly because they had met a superior wit, but in this script, ever single person our hero tries to skewer whaps her right back (or at least has the wherewithal to say some version of, “It sucks that you’re talking to me that way.”) My favorite exchange: Jenny says to her headmistress, Emma Thompson, “I suppose you think I’m a ‘fallen woman.’” To which Thompson bats back, “Oh, you’re not a woman.”
   
4. Most deleted scenes are ultimately inconsequential, but here we have one that could not have been more important: Jenny’s only real confrontation with David after the truth comes out! But it was brilliant to cut it. The scene had way too much closure. What’s so great about the final onscreen ending is that it’s haunting. She never expunges the ghost of David, so he hovers over her whole life. She can pretend that it never happened, but she’ll always know better. Scherfig knew she had a brilliant script on her hands...but she also knew that the last page blew it, and a better one would make it a classic. She kept pushing until she found the bittersweet ending the movie needed. (Sarsgaard says the confrontation scene “never felt right in any way, shape or form.”)
5. Everything in this movie just swings. The clothes David buys her, the locations he takes her to, and especially the music playing there are delightfully hip. Who knew Mel Tormé could rock out? The country was waiting for the Beatles to wake them up (Jenny says “This whole stupid country is bored”) but, in some ways, it never looked cooler.
   
6. One thing I love about the movie is how low-stakes it is. Nobody ever pulls a gun. It’s just one girl’s education on the line, which is a hard way to make a movie, but refreshing. Sherfig says in the doc: “I was always taught that it doesn’t matter if a little girl’s dress is torn, or if 500 soldiers get killed on film, it’s a matter of which scale you weigh things on, and this film is hopefully as emotional as if something much more drastic had happened.”

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2008

The Year: 2008

What the Nominees Were: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost Nixon, Milk, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: How did The Wrestler and Doubt not get nominations?? They’re certainly both better than Frost Nixon (which is an okay movie, but still!)

What Did Win: Slumdog Millionaire
How It’s Aged: It certainly has dated cinematography and editing. Very melodramatic story driven by a series of huge coincidences (every single question on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” can be answered by a trauma from his past?) And why would the host be rooting against him? Winners are big ratings. I didn’t get this movie.

What Should’ve Won: Milk
How Hard Was the Decision: A very hard choice between Milk, The Wrestler and Doubt. Three fantastic films, but this inspiring biopic felt the most like an Oscar winner to me.

Director: Gus Van Sant
Writer: Dustin Lance Black
Stars: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, James Franco

The Story: Closeted New York office worker Harvey Milk turns 40 without having accomplished anything, so he gets a boyfriend, moves to San Francisco, opens a camera store, and starts running for office over and over until he finally gets a position on the Board of Supervisors. He and the mayor are assassinated by a fellow supervisor, who serves all of five years time for it.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Actor and Original Screenplay. It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actor for Brolin, Costume Design, Editing, and Score.
Why It Didn’t Win: Out of these five nominees it was a pretty baffling loss. One suspects that this was another Brokeback Mountain situation.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. The (non-Oscar) success of a movie like Brokeback Mountain is great, but it always opens up a can of worms, because it becomes a danger of the “lone example.” This is our turn in the spotlight? Is that how you see us? Do we always have to be closeted? Why can’t we be out and proud? This movie became a necessary corrective, showing the other half of the story. (Of course, another question was “Do we always have to get killed by homophobes?” and this movie was very much not a corrective to that, but it’s the nature of this story.)
2. I kept tearing up during the movie, not because of Harvey’s death but because of his speeches (stirringly scored by Danny Elfman) and the phone calls he gets from suicidal teenagers. This is an excellent old-fashioned good vs. evil movie, just with a different “good” than we normally get.
   
3. None of the major cast is gay, and there’s been a cultural shift in the years since that gay characters should be played by gay actors (though still not that Jewish actors should play Jewish characters, interestingly) but it’s hard to imagine anyone finding fault with Penn’s performance. The movie is heavily indebted to the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, and with a wealth of footage of the real Harvey, Penn was able to channel Milk to an uncanny degree. (Gone are the days of Six Degrees of Separation when Will Smith could play a gay lead and yet refuse to kiss any guys, thankfully!)
   
4. Van Sant had made a series of excellent gay movies way outside the system and poised himself to be the one to get the call up when Hollywood was finally ready to tell this story. He keeps some of the independent spirit by cutting back and forth liberally between film stocks and interspersing lively tricks like this visualization of a phone tree. The movie pulses with life.
   
5. Early on, Harvey gets a death threat in the mail and puts it on his fridge to show he’s not afraid. Later, as threats increase, he finally becomes scared of it, takes it off and throws it away. A great use of showing internal change through objects.
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2007

The Year: 2007
What the Nominees Were: Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, Atonement, There Will Be Blood
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Nope, that’s a great list.

What Did Win: No Country for Old Men
How It’s Aged: It’s brilliant, one of the best movies of the 21st century. Certainly one of the most chilling villains ever presented. And yet…

What Should’ve Won: There Will Be Blood
How Hard Was the Decision: Extremely hard. How could I take away such a deserving Oscar win? But There Will Be Blood is even better. If I could move either of these by a year either way, they would both easily win.

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Writer: Anderson, very loosely based on the novel “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair
Stars: Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano

The Story: In 1898 silver prospector Daniel Plainview discovers oil instead and shifts focus. When his shady practices kill one of his men, he adopts the man’s toddler son, H.W. Later H.W. is deafened in another accident, and his relationship with his father becomes more and more strained. Meanwhile, Daniel gets into an longstanding struggle with a preacher named Eli Sunday, resulting in a death-by-bowing-pin.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Actor and Cinematography, but lost Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Editing and Sound Editing.
Why It Didn’t Win: The Academy had unwisely passed over Fargo and now the Coens were overdue, so this movie just couldn’t compete with No Country for Old Men.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Anyone whose read “The Jungle” won’t be surprised to hear that, in Sinclair’s novel, the anti-drilling heroes turn to socialism, but Anderson eliminates all that here (as well as all reference to the real-life Teapot Dome scandal). Instead, Anderson crafts a story similar in feel to that of a different muckraking novelist, Frank Norris, whose “McTeague” became the legendary silent movie Greed. Ultimately, Anderson was right to make the story his own. No one in the movie has the moral standing to heroically denounce Daniel, but the viewer sees enough to do that ourselves.
2. Usually, when I walk out of movie talking about its intrusive score, it’s because I didn’t like it (I’m looking at you, Hans Zimmer). This is one of the rare movies where the score is very noticeable and I actually loved it. Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood makes the whole movie weirder and more discordant than it would have been, which is all to the good. (Anderson gives Greenwood a great showcase by having no dialogue in the first 15 minutes, which have a similar feel to a previous winner of mine, 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
   
3. Noted Hollywood asshole Quentin Tarantino recently picked a fight with this movie for no reason, claiming that it was ruined by a bad performance from Dano. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Dano is brilliant. Yes, it’s hard to compete when you have every scene opposite a never-better Day-Lewis, but Dano’s counterforce keeps those scenes crackling with life.
   
4. Wikipedia takes Daniel at his word when he says that he only adopted H.W. to make himself more appealing when he showed up to buy people’s land, but I don’t believe it. Daniel spends the whole movie looking for family, and it’s only when H.W. rejects him for the last time that Daniel lashes out with that claim. Yes, Daniel is an utterly evil psychopath, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t desire love and belonging as much as the next man, though he’s incapable of receiving it.
5. My favorite line from the movie is when Eli asks Daniel for money at the end and then adds “plus the five that is owed to me, with interest.” In the war of humiliations that has escalated between the men, Daniel had previously been “forced” to make a five thousand dollar donation to Eli’s church, but of course, it turns out he never paid it, because we all know that the secret of getting rich in America is to never pay your debts. And you scarcely even need to bury to succession of dead bodies you leave behind. No Country for Old Men may be an equally good movie to this one, and it’s got a great villain, but I find Daniel even more compelling, and I think he speaks to our real life national pain better, so I’ll give it to this one.
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2006

The Year: 2006
What the Nominees Were: Babel, The Departed, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Half Nelson was pretty brilliant. Over in Germany, The Lives of Others was great.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: The Departed
How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard, because The Departed is not an all-time classic. I slightly prefer Half Nelson and Letters from Iwo Jima, but not strongly enough that I felt like I could take away Scorsese’s win. In the end, possession is nine tenths of the law.

Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: William Monahan, based on the movie Infernal Affairs, screenplay by Alan Mak and Felix Chong
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, Alec Baldwin

The Story: Conflicted cop Billy Costigan goes deep undercover infiltrating the operation of Boston mob boss Frank Costello, but Costello has his own infiltrator in the police, a go-getter named Colin Sullivan. Which rat will sniff out the other first, and will anyone be left alive?

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Editing. It lost Supporting Actor for Wahlberg.
How It Won: I remember that it was a little shocking at the time, because reviews were not ecstatic, but Scorsese had never won and it was time to make up for past slights. Scorsese is one of the most beloved figures in Hollywood, and this movie was just good enough to get him across the finish line.

Why It Won:

1. This is not Scorsese’s best movie (I’ve already given one to Goodfellas, and Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are certainly better than this one, but got passed over in stronger years) but it is the most fun. It’s simply a thrilling cops-n-robbers shoot-em-up. It seems like everybody had a blast making it.
2. DiCaprio seems to have taken to heart the criticism of his terrible performance as an Irish-American in Scorsese’s earlier picture Gangs of New York and portrays the nationality much more authentically here. He talks on the DVD about the research he had to do. Damon and Wahlberg, on the other hand, are actually Southie guys and get to let that all hang out for once. Wahlberg got his only Oscar nomination and earns it, but Damon should have gotten one, too. Wahlberg says it was easy to channel the role from his childhood memories, with the only difference was that he was playing the kind of guy who used to arrest kids like him.
   
3. Costigan is ordered to put his info into an envelope, but the envelope has the word Citizen misspelled so he crosses it off and writes it correctly. Well, as it turns out, this envelope changes hands many times, and it’s very important that we notice it each time we see it, and characters who spot it briefly have to recognize it instantly. Crossing out that word was a brilliant way to do that.
   
4. Costello is closely based on real life criminal Whitey Bulger, who ran crime in Boston for 20 years while secretly informing for the FBI. Amazingly, Bulger was at large when they made this (#2 on the FBI’s Most Wanted list) which makes this a rather courageous story to tell. (Bulger was eventually caught, convicted and murdered in prison in 2018.)
5. There’s a lot of cultural appropriation going on here. Screenwriters Mak and Chong wrote a movie about their native Hong Kong, then Monohan kept just the bones of that and built a new story about his native Boston Irish, and Scorsese chose to direct it because it reminded him of growing up around the Italian-American mafia in Little Italy. For this movie to come together, everybody had to trust that what they knew was universal enough to fit into someone else’s framework.
6. There are X’s in every scene where somebody gets killed, which is a direct reference to the original version of Scarface, which did the same thing. Scorsese talks about in the extras how he couldn’t deal with the mob in the streets growing up because his asthma left him too weak to fight back, so he hid in the movie houses. The two places were equally important in giving Scorsese the abilities he would someday need.
   
7. Before this movie, screenwriters were terrified of cell phones. It seemed like these magical devices would make storytelling suddenly impossible, because they could solve most problems the writers could dream up. But this movie came up with all sorts of ways that cell phones, and the primitive state of texting, could create more dramatic possibilities, not fewer. (Of course, at the time, when phones still had keypads, you could text with your phone in your pocket, something you can’t do with modern phones.)
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2005

The Year: 2005

What the Nominees Were: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: The Squid and the Whale was a great coming of age tale. Over in France, The Child was a heartbreaker.

What Did Win: Crash
How It’s Aged: Terribly. A bunch of smugly-satisfied and all-too-tidy parables about race that only a wealthy white person could dream up. And writer-director Paul Haggis turned out to be a bad guy.

What Should’ve Won: Brokeback Mountain
How Hard Was the Decision: Not exactly hard! This is the most frequently cited Oscar injustice.

Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx
Stars: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams

The Story: Two cowboys (shepherds actually) fall for each other on a long summer alone up on the titular mountain. Afterwards, they both return to their homes to marry women and have kids, but they reunite many times for “fishing trips” over the next twenty years, until one of them dies from what may have been a gay-bashing.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Director, Adapted Screenplay and Score. It lost Picture, Actor for Ledger, Supporting Actor for Gyllenhaal, Supporting Actress for Williams, and Cinematography.
Why It Didn’t Win: Three guesses! There were several interviews with the aging population of Oscar voters in which they said that gay stuff was too inherently gross to them. The Academy was hugely criticized for this decision, so they inducted a boatload of young voters to keep it from happening again.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This was a story that needed to be told. The time had finally come to tell America’s first great gay romantic epic. McMurtry had written screenplays about cowboys before, and Lee had directed a movie about gay protagonists, but only by putting that together did they produce the best movie either would ever touch. As McMurtry says on the DVD, “It’s been laying there in the west for a long long time, attraction between cowboys.” (And I shouldn’t short Ossana’s contribution. In their interview, they say that McMurtry focused on the women but Ossana focused on the men “Larry seems to think that I have more intuitiveness about the men than he does.”)
   
2. How do you write beautifully? It’s easy: put a lot of big beautiful dialogue into your characters’ mouths. But great writers can tell stories about anybody, even a hero like Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar, who can barely communicate longer than a grunt. As Hathaway says, “When he talks, the words are punching themselves out of his mouth.” In the end, it’s probably Ennis’s silence that allows him to survive, as opposed to Jack, who may have said the wrong thing to the wrong person.
   
3. All the actors make it clear that Ennis was the perfect avatar for Lee himself, who is just as silent off camera as Ennis is on camera. As Ledger says “He doesn’t say too much, but when he does it’s somewhat kind of poetic and profound… Ang is a beautiful beautiful person, complex, quiet, mysterious character”
4. A 30 page short story has been expanded into an epic, covering many years and life changes. The shocking thing is how many faces pop up that would go on to be familiar, including Linda Cardellini, Anna Ferris, Kate Mara, and even David Harbour as Gyllenhaal’s new romantic prospect! Give it up to casting director Avy Kaufman for spotting potential talent.
   
5. As the two men play with fire over the course of 20 years, everyone else in their lives eventually pieces together the truth, one by one. The looks on their faces as they realize are all examples of Lee’s super-subtle directorial brilliance. (Most of them slightly harden their eyes when they figure out they’ve been deceived. Only Jack’s mom softens them.)
   
6. How did cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto make the mountain look so gorgeous? Partially by making the towns intentionally ugly, causing us to long for the romantic idylls when they finally arrive. (Every time the Wyoming-ites appear on screen I couldn’t keep from thinking, “These miserable people have 20x as much representation as me in the Senate. They should be ecstatic.”)

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2004

The Year: 2004
What the Nominees Were: The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby, Ray, Sideways 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the most obvious one! For that matter, Mean Girls is a better movie than The Aviator.

What Did Win: Million Dollar Baby
How It’s Aged: It’s a good movie. Gruesome and unpleasant, but an excellent acting showcase for both Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank.

What Should’ve Won: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
How Hard Was the Decision: Sideways is almost equally great, and it was very hard choosing between the two. But ultimately, I think Endless Sunshine might be my favorite of the 21st century, so I should certainly award it the prize for the best movie of 2004.

Director: Michel Gondry
Writer: Charlie Kaufman, from a story by Kaufman, Gondry and Pierre Bismuth

Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson

The Story: Joel Barish pays a company called Lacuna to erase his memories of a painful relationship with a girl named Clementine, but in the middle of the process he starts to rebel and tries to flee the wave of annihilation making its way through his memories.

Any Nominations or Wins: Just two: It won Original Screenplay and lost Best Actress for Winslet. It’s insane that Carrey didn’t get a nomination. The Academy really hates him.
Why It Didn’t Win: Too weird, I guess? In a year full of weak nominations, the failure to nominate this movie has to be remembered among the Academy’s greatest marks of shame.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Michel Gondry won the right to direct this after making some brilliant music videos (check out “The Hardest Button to Button”) and he went afterwards on to make some very good movies (I’m a big fan of Be Kind Rewind) but nothing that matched this. The imagination that fueled the music videos is on display when he creates a giant table for grown-Carrey to hide beneath as he relives his small childhood.
   
2. Why does the Academy hate Jim Carrey so much? He’s never gotten so much as a nomination despite deserving wins for The Truman Show and this. Is it because he got his start in such anti-intellectual fare as Ace Ventura, or is it a certain quality of guilelessness he can have that the Academy finds either disturbing or disingenuous? Either way, their bias is a mark against them, not him.
   
3. Like Memento this is a puzzle box movie where you let out a big “Ah-ha!” when you figure out the order the scenes are happening in, realizing we begin with a flashforward, not a flashback. Some of Charlie Kaufman’s other scripts were too clever by half, but in this one he found the perfect balance of genuine emotion with mind-bending brilliance.
4. Kaufman and Gondry pack the screen with dazzling imagination as the memories are deleted (starting with the spines of books), but there are also great visuals that have nothing to do with the deletions. As Taylor Swift would later realize, snow at the beach is always an arresting image.
   
5. This may be the only chance I get to praise the always great Kirsten Dunst, who is both funny and heartbreaking here as an assistant with a crush on the head scientist, and who gets to deliver the title line, though she accidentally credits it to Pope Alexander, rather than Alexander Pope.
   
   
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2003

The Year: 2003
What the Nominees Were: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Lost in Translation, Master and Commander, Mystic River, Seabiscuit
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: American Splendor should definitely have gotten a nomination. Elf and the first Pirates of the Caribbean are both shockingly good movies and I wouldn’t mind if either had gotten a nod.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
How Hard Was the Decision: A very hard choice between that and American Splendor, which is certainly my favorite of the two, but ultimately I came to the same conclusion the Academy did: The totality of the Lord of the Rings films deserved some acknowledgement, and the most convenient time to do that was with the final film in the series.

Director: Peter Jackson
Writers: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Jackson, based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien
Stars: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin

The Story: Questing Hobbits Frodo and Sam finally throw the ring into Mount Doom, while their human friend Aragorn (assisted by Legolas the Elf, Gimli the Troll and Gandalf the Wizard) takes over the titular job.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It got no acting nominations, but it did win all 11 it was nominated for: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costume Design, Editing, Makeup, Score, Song, Sound Mixing and Visual Effects!
How It Won: The previous two films in the trilogy had been nominated, but neither even attempted to have a satisfying ending, which would have made it downright bizarre if either one had won. But this one had six endings, so they couldn’t complain about that this time, and now it seemed like the series was overdue. As an 8-hour epic, it was pretty damn impressive.

Why It Won:

1. Of course, nobody watches the 8-hour version anymore, because the series was expanded to 11 hours on DVD and this is one case where the expanded cut is clearly superior, filling in holes that were baffling in the theater (I hadn’t read the books yet at the time. Shortly afterward, I read them myself, then later read them aloud separately to both kids, so I’m hyperaware of what’s still missing.) This Oscar I’m giving is really for that version.
   
2. Of course, then you’re not done, because, while you have the DVDs out, you have to watch the 10 hours of documentaries, which reveal that this may be the greatest seven year collaboration in filmmaking history, with a crew of long-suffering New Zealanders manually linking over twelve million individual polycarbonate rings using pliers to make all the chainmail, not to mention every other gorgeous element of the world you see onscreen. Dozens of other fantasy films followed this one, but they all lacked Jackson’s mad vision and an antipodean country full of laborers willing to follow him off that cliff.
   
3. Heartbreakingly delivered by Sean Astin, “But I can carry you” is one of cinema’s greatest lines. I’m tearing up as I’m typing this. It’s a crime that Astin wasn’t nominated.
   
4. I’m not sure I would have nominated anyone else in the cast for this one, but they’re all excellent, especially Viggo Mortensen in the title role. He had been plugging away as a minor actor for 15 years (He’s in Witness!), then got the call-up for these epic movies with two weeks’ notice after Stuart Townsend filmed a few scenes and didn’t work out. It’s one of the great Hollywood Cinderella stories. Like Wood and Astin, he’s an American embodying a quintessentially British hero, but he has all the gravitas of a RADA-trained dramatic actor.
   
5. Of course, when I read these books to my daughter, she couldn’t help but point out how little the female characters are given to do (Jackson, Boyens and Walsh made halting efforts to beef up their roles in the screenplays), but thankfully this book and movie have one great feminist moment that makes up for a lot of it. Say it with me: “I am no man.”
   

Ah, 2003: Alas, I couldn’t find any interesting ads. Maybe it’s time to retire these as we get to the era of fewer print ads, less nostalgia and everything being less dated.